On Monday Barack Obama is to sign an ENDA executive order that bars federal contractors from discrimination against LGBT employees. Thankfully, Obama seemingly has listened to his party's base and is rejecting calls from Republicans and, of course, Christofascists to allow special rights to those consumed with anti-gay animus to discriminate at will. It goes without saying that the professional Christian class and leaders of hate groups such as Family Research Council and The Family Foundation here in Virginia will be launching into spittle flecked rants attacking Obama and claiming that anti-gay bigots are being persecuted. The response to them is easy: if you want to discriminate, then don't put your hand out for federal money It's really that simple. These bigots do not get to have their cake and eat it too. Here are highlights from Think Progress:

Federal contractors will not be able to discriminate against LGBT
people in hiring even if they have a religious objection, the Obama
Administration will announce on Monday.

Last month, the administration announced it would amend two executive orders
barring employers who rely on federal funds from discriminating against
a series of traits. The current order includes race, color, religion,
sex, or national origin. Now, it will also include gender identity and
sexual orientation. The move is a Band-Aid solution to the broader
problem of Congress not passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act
(ENDA) that would bar all employers from discriminating against people
based on their sexuality.

When the announcement came last month, though, there remained an open
question as to whether religious objectors would be exempt. About 140
religious leaders requested broad exemptions, while more than 100 members of clergy specifically asked Obama not to include such an exemption. On Friday, Politico reported
that the administration will not heed the former requests, and will
instead make the rule apply more broadly to all federal contractors.

“This is a tremendous victory for those of us who believe that as
people of faith we should be exemplary, not exempted,” said Rev. Fred
Davie, Executive Vice President at Union Theological Seminary. Rev.
Davie will be a guest when the President signs the executive order on
Monday. “Religions of the world across the ages have engendered and
supported discrimination and bigotry from deceptively genteel to utterly
horrific.

[T]he order will actually effect over a million LGBT workers in the
United States, and will be the largest expansion of LGBT workers’ rights
in the nation’s history. In 29 states, it is legal to fire someone for
being gay. In 34, an employer can fire someone with no recourse if they
are transgender.

The executive order will keep in place an exemption established by
President George W. Bush in 2002 that allows religious contractors to
favor employees with the same religion for religious roles.

Some say that Democrats have an enthusiasm deficit compared to the GOP going into the midterms. In some ways that is perhaps true since Democrats done have the insane and hate driven Christofascists and Tea Party cretins that comprise the core of the GOP base. I like to think that that is a good thing and means that the Democrats have sane and rational followers that don't act like a mob of Islamic fundamentalists the way the Christofascists do. Some are trying to energize and rally the liberal base of the Democratic Party and make them realize that complacency in the face of the menace that today's GOP comprises for average Americans. Politico looks at Warren's campaign stops for other Democrats and to speaking engagements with liberal activists. Here are some highlights:

Elizabeth Warren received a
thunderous reception at Netroots Nation on Friday as she pledged to fight a
“rigged” system in a country of rising income inequality.

The Massachusetts Democrat ascended
the stage here at this annual liberal gathering to chants of “Run, Liz, Run.”
Many in the audience touted “Elizabeth Warren for President” signs and some
sported hats bearing the same message. The senator, smiling, shushed the 2016
cheers, urging everyone to “sit down, sit down. Let’s get started.”

In the speech, which clocked in at a
little more than 15 minutes and sounded at times like a campaign address,
Warren depicted America as a place of gross inequality, where the wealthy few
are on the rise while everyone else gets squeezed out.

“The way I see this is, we can whine about it, we can whimper about it,
or we can fight back,” she said to cheers. “I’m fighting back. I’m ready to
fight back. Are you ready to fight back?”

Employing the populist language she
frequently embraces, Warren charged that “the game is rigged and the rich and
the powerful have lobbyists and lawyers and plenty of friends in Congress.
Everybody else, not so much.”

her fans see Warren as an aggressive
champion for working people, willing to take the fight to Wall Street, to big
corporations and to Capitol Hill. And in the address, Warren embraced that
image.

“We don’t win every time,” said
Warren, who has recently been hitting the trail to stump for Democrats running
in the midterm elections. “But we’re learning to win. We’re learning to win,
and we will keep winning. We will fight and we will win.”

“We believe —I can’t believe I have
to say this in 2014 —we believe in equal pay for equal work, and we’re willing
to fight for it,” she said to big applause. “We believe that equal means equal
and that’s true in marriage, that’s true in the workplace, that’s true in all
of America, and we’re willing to fight for it.”

Some of the loudest applause of the morning came when she dinged the
Supreme Court ruling in the Hobby Lobby case, which allows some private
companies to claim religious exemptions and not pay for contraceptive coverage
mandated under the health care law. Democrats see the ruling as one way to
galvanize base enthusiasm ahead of the midterms.

“Oh, and we believe that
corporations are not people,” Warren said, a reference to a comment Mitt Romney
made in the last presidential election. “That women have a right to their
bodies. We will overturn Hobby Lobby and we will fight for it, we will fight
for it.”

On the issues, Warren is correct. The system is rigged. I see it all the time in the real estate and financial sphere. What I find the most ironic is that Warren's message and values are much more in keeping with the Gospel message that are the policies supported by the Chrisofascists who hate her.

As Evangelical leaders and their political whores in the Republican Party increasingly embrace ignorance and reject modernity itself, many of the sheeple they con preach to are being played for fools and lead down a path to self-marginalization. Frank Schaeffer has an open letter to Evangelicals at Huffington Post that looks at the manner in which these people are being played and challenges them to wake up and open their eyes - and minds. Will they listen? Probably not, but thankfully, more and more of the younger generations are walking away from their poisonous beliefs. Here are excerpts from the letter:

Your real enemies are not progressive Christian/Atheist/Backsliders like me. Your real enemies are some of the influential people who pretend to be your friends. They are your Nemesis.

I'll bet the board members of Gordon College, Wheaton College and Christianity Today have
no idea about the real reasons behind a bad set of choices they were
duped into making in order to serve a purely political agenda
masquerading as a "religious liberty" issue. They've been had.

A
day is fast approaching where ordinary evangelicals will be cursing
Wheaton College, Gordon College and the other evangelical establishment
bastions that demanded the right to discriminate against women and gays
as a matter of "religious liberty."

So many evangelicals live in bubbles that they have no idea how the
real world functions. They are going to find out that outside the
comfortable inner circle of home-school, Christian school, Christian
radio, TV and publishing, churches and Bible study groups, to the larger
world people who want to discriminate against gays and women are weird
outcasts to be shunned.

I mean what young man or woman wants their
university degree to be from a pariah institution? Who wants to teach
someplace that has the moral standing of the old apartheid regime of
South Africa?

The argument will soon be made that if Christians can "legally"
discriminate against gays and women then secular institutions should be
able to exercise their consciences and discriminate against
evangelicals. Just wait.

[T]he evangelical institutions that are making the anti-women and
anti-gay headlines are going to discover that their more moderate
religious and secular peers are going to punish them. They will also be
losing their young people in droves.

Re-accreditation? "Forget it,
you have a policy of discrimination against gays and women." Find
sports teams to play your students? Want your professors to publish and
deliver papers at national conferences? "Forget it, you have a policy of
discrimination against gays and women..."

Neoconservative activists like George and his Beckett Fund, and
Colson helped set the stage for the Tea Party and what should be called
the Biblical Patriarchy Restoration Movement. They gave a gloss of
intellectual respectability to what was a theocratic wish list targeting
gays and women as a means to target President Obama and the Democratic
Party. That's the real game. It is a game worthy of Karl Rove, in fact
it is his game...

The aim was not freedom for religion
but a chance to deliver a blow against a president that many
evangelicals have never accepted as legitimate but that the racist
Republican establishment hates. The result risks fulfilling Justice
Ginsburg's "minefield" prediction where the rule of law and equal
protection fade into chaos.

The larger American community
will not stand for this. Most evangelicals won't either. They are good
loving people. Wheaton, Gordon and Christianity Today Magazine
at al are mere tools in a larger fight. Now they are marked as bastions
of intolerance. They will pay a heavy price. They have been abused.
That is a shame. Evangelicals deserved better. The cause of Christ did
too.

In point of fact, Gordon College is already paying a price for its demands for t he right to discriminate. The City of Salem, Massachusetts is severing all ties to the college because Gordon's discriminatory policies violate the city's non-discrimination policies. Hopefully, more cities and even states will join this tide and severe ties and cut funding to discriminatory "christian" colleges and universities. Back2Stonewall has details on the City of Salem's decision to dump Gordon College:

In response to Gordon College President D. Michael Lindsay’s recent
actions signing a letter in support of an religious exemption from
federal regulations that bar employment discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as the current policies
at Gordon College that require strict adherence to behavioral standards
for students, faculty and staff that are discriminatory towards LGBT
individuals -the city of Salem. Massachusetts has terminated all
contracts with the college.

In a letter from Salem Mayor Kim Driscoll to Gordon College President Lindsay:

“I am truly disappointed in the stance you have
taken, which plainly discriminates against the rights of LGBT
individuals, both on and off campus. These actions fly in the face of
the City of Salem’s Non-Discrimination Ordinance, which prohibits our
municipality from contracting with entities that maintain discriminatory
practices. While I respect your rights to embed religious values on a
private college campus, religious freedom does not afford you the right
to impose those beliefs upon others and cannot be extended into a
publicly owned facility or any management contract for a publicly owned
facility, like Old Town Hall. Moreover, I hope you realize how hurtful
and offensive these “behavioral standards” are to members of the greater
Salem LGBT community, some of whom are Gordon alumni, staff and/or
students.

It saddens me to curb our contractual relationship in this
manner, despite a long and positive relationship with Gordon College
over the years, however, not doing so would be a violation of our
Non-Discrimination Ordinance and even more troubling, allow a
contractual relationship between the City of Salem and an institution
that enables, and now advocates for discrimination against the LGBT
community. As Mayor, I most certainly cannot let that stand.”

Let's hope Regent University and Liberty University soon find themselves as pariahs.

Following up on the last post, the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 has hopefully exposed the lie of Russia's fairy tale that it is ethnic Russians in Ukraine who are driving the separatist effort in the eastern portion of the country. Without Russia's active support, training and supply of weaponry, the movement would not exist. And the chess master behind it is Vladimir Putin (I loved the description of him as "rat faced" in the Times column). A column in the Washington Post continues to focus on the lies and dangerous agenda of Putin and his efforts to sow hate and discord which cost 298 individuals their lives, including 100 some top AIDS researchers and humanitarians.. Here are highlights:

Before there is any further discussion of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, it’s important that one point be made absolutely clear: This plane crash is a result of the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine,
an operation deliberately designed to create legal, political and
military chaos. Without this chaos, a surface-to-air missile would not
have been fired at a passenger plane.

From the beginning, the Russian government did not send regular
soldiers to Ukraine. Instead, it sent Russian mercenaries and security
service operatives such as Igor Strelkov — the commander in chief in Donetsk and a Russian secret police colonel who fought in both Chechen wars — and Vladimir Antyufeyev,
the Donetsk “deputy prime minister” who led the Latvian KGB’s attempt
to overthrow the independent Latvian government in 1991.

With the help of local thugs, these Russian security men besieged police stations,
government offices and other symbols of political authority to
delegitimize the Ukrainian state. In this task, they were assisted by
the Russian government and by Russia’s state-controlled mass media, both
of which still constantly denigrate Ukraine and its “Nazi” government.
Just in the past week, Russian reporting on Ukraine reached a new pitch
of hysteria, with fake stories about the supposed crucifixion of a
child and an extraordinary documentary comparing the Ukrainian army’s
defense of its own country with the Rwandan genocide.

This is the context within which a surface-to-air missile was aimed
at a passenger plane: a lawless environment; irregular soldiers who
might not be so good at reading radar; a nihilistic disregard for human
life; scorn for international norms, rules or standards. Just for the
record: There weren’t any Ukrainian government-controlled anti-aircraft
missiles in eastern Ukraine because the separatists were not flying
airplanes.

Until now, these unorthodox methods have worked well for the
Russians. They unnerved and distracted the Ukrainian government while
allowing foreign governments, and European governments in particular,
to turn a blind eye. Because the war was not a “real” war, it could be
described as “local,” as “containable,” it could remain a low priority
for European foreign policy or indeed for anybody’s foreign policy.

If it has done nothing else, the crash of Flight 17 has just put an
end to the “it’s not a real war” fairy tale, both for the Russians and
for the West. Tragically, this unconventional non-war war just killed 298 people, mostly Europeans.
We can’t pretend it isn’t happening any longer or that it doesn’t
affect anyone outside of Donetsk. The Russians can’t pretend either.

Without the fairy-tale pretense, some things are about to become
clear. For one, we are about to learn whether the West in 2014 is as
united and as determined to stop terrorism as it was 26 years ago.

It is insufficient to state, as President Obama now has
, that there must be a “cease-fire” in Ukraine. What is needed is a
withdrawal of Russian mercenaries, weapons and support. The West — and
the world — must push for Ukrainian state sovereignty to be
re-established in eastern Ukraine, not for the perpetuation of another
frozen conflict.

The echoes of Hitler's tactics in the 1930's must be opposed and stopped. Appeasement and willful denial will only lead to more tragedies and needless deaths. Putin needs to become an international pariah and Russians need to understand that the wisest thing they can do is overthrow his corrupt and brutal regime.

While we are nearing the 100th anniversary of World War I, events in Ukraine and the downing of a civilian airliner by Russia backed separatists/terrorists is in some ways more reminiscent of the eve of World War II when Adolph Hitler used a doctrine now being copied by Vladimir Putin to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia, then Austria, and then Poland: protecting ethic Germans just as Putin claims to be protecting ethnic Russians. Recently Andrew Sullivan aptly described Putin as a 21st century would be fascist Tsar. An even better description would be to say it like it is: Putin is recycling Hitler's dangerous agenda both in terms of the claims to be "protecting" ethnic Russians and of scapegoating minorities like gays to fuel xenophobia. A column in the New York Times calls out Putin. Here are excerpts:

SOMETIMES, just sometimes, you should pay attention to annoying things said by tiresome people at worthy conferences.

In 1994, I was half asleep at a round table in St. Petersburg, Russia,
when a short, thickset man with a rather ratlike face — apparently a
sidekick of the city’s mayor — suddenly piped up. Russia, he said, had
voluntarily given up “huge territories” to the former republics of the
Soviet Union, including areas “which historically have always belonged
to Russia.” He was thinking “not only about Crimea and northern
Kazakhstan, but also for example about the Kaliningrad area.” Russia
could not simply abandon to their fate those “25 million Russians” who
now lived abroad. The world had to respect the interests of the Russian
state “and of the Russian people as a great nation.”

The name of this irritating little man was — you guessed it — Vladimir V. Putin, and I know exactly what he said back in 1994 because the organizers, the Körber Foundation of Hamburg, Germany, published
a full transcript. For the phrase that I have translated as “the
Russian people,” the German transcript uses the word “volk.” Mr. Putin
seemed to have, and still has, an expansive, völkisch definition of
“Russians” — or what he now refers to as the “russkiy mir” (literally
“Russian world”).

The transcript also records that I teased out the
consequences of the then-obscure deputy mayor’s vision by saying, “If we
defined British nationality to include all English-speaking people, we
would have a state slightly larger than China.”

Little
did we imagine that, 20 years later, the St. Petersburg deputy mayor,
now uncrowned czar of all the Russians, would have seized Crimea by
force, covertly stirred up violent mayhem in eastern Ukraine and be explicitly advancing his 19th-century völkisch vision as the policy of a 21st-century state.It is impossible to overstate the degree to which this is a threat not
just to Russia’s Eastern European and Eurasian neighbors but to the
whole post-1945 international order. Across the world, countries see men
and women living in other countries whom they regard as in some sense
“their people.”

Poland
has expressed concern for the position of Polish speakers in Lithuania.
Hungary has handed out both passports and voting rights in national
elections to citizens of neighboring countries whom it deems to be
members of the Hungarian people. To pin down what is illegitimate, we
have to explain more clearly what is legitimate.

As
of Friday, American and Ukrainian officials were saying it was likely
that a Russian-made antiaircraft missile had brought down Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17, in yet another harvest of sorrow on Ukrainian fields
already blood-soaked by history. It was not clear who fired it. But it
is hypocrisy on an Orwellian scale for Mr. Putin to maintain, as he did
on Friday, that “the government over whose territory this happened bears
the responsibility for this terrible tragedy.” There is undoubtedly
bitter discontent among many self-identified Russians in eastern
Ukraine, but the violence of their protests has been stirred by a
massively mendacious narrative on Russian television, and their
paramilitaries have been supported, to put it no more strongly, by Mr.
Putin’s Russia — including the presence of members or former members of
Russian special forces.

It
is precisely the ambiguous mixtures created by Mr. Putin’s völkisch
version of the “responsibility to protect” that produce such disastrous
possibilities. He subverts and calls into question the authority of the
government of a sovereign territory, and then blames it for the result.

So
if an obscure deputy mayor starts sounding off in alarming terms at
some conference you are attending, my advice is, Wake up. Of course,
most such ranters do not rise to the top. But when they do, their
ideologies of resentment may be written out in blood.

In the early 1930's people did not see Hitler as a serious threat and the world paid a huge price for such inattention. Putin has all the same megalomania of Hitler and has shown that he is only too willing to recycle the Furher's deadly tactics. What is equally sad is that with Putin, the Russian people are again being betrayed and harmed by a failed ruler. In Russia, history keeps repeating itself.

As it did with Utah's anti-gay animus based Christofascist backed ban on same sex marriage, yesterday the United States Court of Appeals ruled that Oklahoma's similar ban was likewise unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution (meanwhile, here in Virginia, the 4th Circuit continues to sit on its thumbs and has not released its ruling in the Bostic appeal). Meanwhile, the Supreme Court yesterday stayed the 10th Circuit's ruling in the Utah case pending the outcome of Utah's desperate last ditch effort to allow Christofascists to force their religious beliefs on all Americans. Here are highlights from the Tulsa World on the 10th Circuit decision:

Oklahoma’s ban on same-sex marriages moved closer to being lifted Friday.

A federal appeals court struck down the ban as
unconstitutional, bringing measured celebrations within Tulsa’s LGBT
community and strong words from Gov. Mary Fallin.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that
the ban violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection
under the law for everyone.

“States may not, consistent with the U.S. Constitution, prohibit same-sex marriages,” the judges wrote. The court stayed its opinion, putting it on hold pending an expected challenge.

Fallin criticized the court’s decision in a prepared statement.

“Today’s ruling is another instance of federal
courts ignoring the will of the people and trampling on the right of
states to govern themselves,” Fallin said. “In this case, two judges
have acted to overturn a law supported by Oklahomans. Their decision
will be appealed and, I hope, overturned.”

Friday’s 46-page decision by the two-judge majority rejected arguments
by opponents of same-sex marriages that children have an interest in
being raised by their biological parents and that a ban on same-sex
marriages is valid because only opposite-sex couples are capable of
being procreative.

The Court's full decision can be read here. It is noteworthy that Gov. Fallin favors mob majority rule and conveniently forgets that once upon a time majorities favored slavery, and later segregation and bans on bans on interracial marriage. Just because a majority supports something doesn't make it right or constitutional. As noted many times before, I long for the day when Christians are a minority in America and when what they have sown may come back to haunt them severely. Suddenly, you will not hear them preach for mob majority rule.

Through the centuries religion has caused untold evil and, as continues to be the case today, the evil is done in the name of God. And with the Christofascists the basis of their evil efforts is always supposed biblical authority. Never mind that they disregard huge portions of the Bible and act in a manner usually diametrically the opposite of the Gospel message. A piece in Salon looks at some of the evil done by today's Christofascists - who make the Pharisees of the Bible look like wonderful people in comparison. Here are some article excerpts:

The Christian persecution complex is
absurd. Modern American Christians are not persecuted or under attack.
But for Christians who are truly concerned about hostility toward their
faith, I have a bit of advice: Don’t be evil. And don’t let your
co-religionists get away with being evil either.

A huge part of the antagonism that even moderate Christians face from
outsiders is due to the fact that too many devout believers claim a
righteous mandate to say and do things that are truly horrible. Let me spell it out.

1. Opposing protections and rights for children is evil.Thanks to the influence of biblical Christianity, the U.S. stands alone with Somalia in failing to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Why? Because the Bible instructs parents to hit their children, among
other things. Laws that give rights to children go head to head with biblical texts which
say in no uncertain terms that children are the property of their
fathers, to be punished or even killed in accordance with the father’s
religious beliefs and other priorities.

2. Denying young people accurate information about their bodies is evil.The U.S. government just spent a decade and a billion dollars on failed abstinence-only
education programs concocted by Bible believers who live in some
delusional world where prohibition works and virginity is next to
godliness. . . . Instead of medically accurate information and thoughtful conversation
about intimacy and childbearing, teens get promise rings and slut shame.

3. Demeaning and subjugating women is evil.When it
comes to dignity and equality for women, instead of acting as moral
torchbearers, Bible believers have been at the back of the pack for
generations, along with conservative factions from other Abrahamic
traditions ranging from Islam to Mormonism.

4. Obstructing humanity’s transition to more thoughtful, intentional childbearing is evil.“If
a woman dies in [child]bearing, let her die; she is there to do it.” So
spoke Martin Luther. But beyond the horrors of women dying after days
of labor or bleeding out after unwanted childbirth, lies the incontrovertible evidence that children, families and whole communities do better when parents can plan their families. As one medical student put it,
“The failure of any sect to support the benefits to humanity that could
be obtained through the use of contraceptive technology is blasphemy.”

5. Undermining science is evil.Science has been called what we know about how not to fool ourselves.The
discovery of empiricism and falsification—a method of inquiry that
forces scholars to ask the questions that could show them wrong—is what
has differentiated modernity from the Middle Ages. . . . .But the scientific method has also become an existential threat to Bible
belief. We know now that the Genesis creation story is myth,
neurotransmitters rather than demons cause mental illness, mandrake roots and dove blood don’t improve female fertility or cure skin diseases, and the cognitive structures of the human mind predispose us to certain kinds of religious belief.

6. Promoting holy war is evil.What first flipped my
bit, what transformed me from an agnostic into an outspoken full-time
antagonist of Bible worship was a conversation with my Evangelical
relatives about the Iraq war. From the vantage of my relatives and my
childhood church “family,” George Bush needed no diplomatic or cultural
expertise; he was Born Again. He didn’t need to seek input from his
earthly father about the invasion, because he asked his Heavenly Father.
Besides, Jesus is coming soon and war in the Middle East is predicted
in the Bible. That makes it not only inevitable, but—in a manner of
speaking—desirable.

7. Abusing and killing queers is evil.The Bible’s clobber verses may
be open to interpretation, but the fact that those verses have caused
centuries of suffering is not. For much of American history, the common
term for queer was the biblical “sodomite,” implying that gays are so
offensive to God that they pose a threat to society as a whole. Thanks
to Christian missionaries, African and Latin American queers also have
now lived for centuries now under the threat of violent death.

8. Destroying Earth’s web of life and impoverishing future generations is evil.The
book of Genesis may say that only man is made in the image of God and
that God gave man dominion over everything that grows or walks the
earth. The book of Matthew may say that the return of Jesus is imminent and that his disciples shouldn’t worry about tomorrow, which will take care of itself. The book of Revelation may teach that this world is just a prelude to streets of gold. But
some of us think the lives and loves of other species have moral weight
of their own. And some of us think that the intricate web that gave us
birth is both precious and precarious, and that the wellbeing of future
generations matters.

9. Trying to suck vulnerable people into your poorly researched worldview is evil. It’s
one thing to latch onto the supernatural worldview you were raised in
or the one that first triggered for you some radically cool temporal lobe micro-seizureor similar altered state. But then failing to do your homework before using your position of adult American privilege to foist your religion on kindergarteners, or families who live in desperate poverty, or people who just got hit by a natural disaster—in
other words people who trust you because you are older or richer or
more powerful or have more access to the very information that you have failed to use—now we’re talking about a violation of ethics. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.

Driven by a huge ego and a fantasy of returning to the glory days of the Russian Empire, Vladimir Putin has continued to fan the flames of civil war in Ukraine - a war largely drawn along religious lines with the Catholic west of Ukraine seeking closer ties to Europe while the Orthodox east seek Russian ties. Now, based on reports so far, it appears that pro-Russia separatists shot down a Malaysian Airlines jetliner with 298 civilians aboard. Sadly, Putin could end this conflict by cutting off supplies to the separatists, but likely will not given his insatiable ego and maniacal desire to restore Russia to greatness even as his own corrupt policies hold it back The New York Times reports on the latest victims of Putin's ego. Here are highlights:

A
Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 298 people aboard exploded, crashed
and burned on a flowered wheat field Thursday in a part of eastern
Ukraine controlled by pro-Russia separatists, blown out of the sky at
33,000 feet by what Ukrainian and American officials described as a
Russian-made antiaircraft missile.

Ukraine
accused the separatists of carrying out what it called a terrorist
attack. American intelligence and military officials said the plane had
been destroyed by a Russian SA-series missile, based on surveillance
satellite data that showed the final trajectory and impact of the
missile but not its point of origin.

There
were strong indications that those responsible may have errantly downed
what they had thought was a military aircraft only to discover, to
their shock, that they had struck a civilian airliner. Everyone aboard
was killed, their corpses littered among wreckage that smoldered late into the summer night.

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, blamed Ukraine’s government for
creating what he called conditions for insurgency in eastern Ukraine,
where separatists have bragged about shooting down at least three
Ukrainian military aircraft. But Mr. Putin did not specifically deny
that a Russian-made weapon had felled the Malaysian jetliner.

Flight 17, which had been bound for Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital,
from Amsterdam with 283 passengers, including three infants, and 15
crew members. Aviation officials said the plane had been traveling an
approved and heavily trafficked route over eastern Ukraine, about 20
miles from the Russia border, when it vanished from radar screens with
no distress signal.

Mr. Najib said he had spoken with the leaders of Ukraine and the
Netherlands, who promised their cooperation. He also said that he had
spoken with President Obama, and that “he and I both agreed that the
investigation must not be hindered in any way.” The remark seemed to
point to concerns about evidence tampering at the crash site, which is
in an area controlled by pro-Russia insurgents.

By Thursday night, American intelligence analysts were increasingly
focused on a theory that rebels had used a Russian-made SA-11
surface-to-air missile system to shoot down the aircraft and operated on
their own fire-control radar, outside the checks and balances of the
national Ukrainian air-defense network.

In Amsterdam, a Malaysia Airlines official, Huib Gorter, said the plane
had carried 154 Dutch passengers; 45 Malaysians, including the crew; and
27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, nine Britons, four Belgians, four
Germans, three Filipinos and one Canadian. The rest of the passengers
had not been identified.

Following the reasoning of other state and federal judges, Monroe County Florida Chief Circuit Judge Luis M. Garcia ruled that Florida's ban on same sex marriage violates the rights of gays and lesbians under the United States Constitution. Not surprisingly, GOP Attorney General Pam Bimbo Bondi has said that she will appeal the ruling in typical GOP political whore fashion as she prostitutes herself to Christofasist and hate groups. While the ruling appears limited to Monroe County - which includes Key West - it obviously puts more pressure on Florida to throw out its anti-gay animus based laws. Here are details from the Miami Herald:

In a decision some called “the beginning of the end” of Florida’s
ban on gay marriage, a Monroe County judge ruled Thursday that two Key
West bartenders and other gay couples must be allowed to marry.

Monroe
County Chief Circuit Judge Luis M. Garcia ordered the county clerk’s
office to begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples as early as
Tuesday morning. In doing so, he sided with Aaron Huntsman and William
Lee Jones, who argued that the ban on same-sex marriage in the Florida
Constitution violated their rights under the U.S. Constitution.

“The
court is aware that the majority of voters oppose same-sex marriage,
but it is our country’s proud history to protect the rights of the
individual, the rights of the unpopular and rights of the powerless,
even at the cost of offending the majority,” Garcia wrote in his
opinion.

Though Garcia’s order applies only to Monroe County, it would
allow same-sex couples from around the state to flock to the Keys to get
married. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, however, quickly filed a
notice of appeal Thursday, putting Garcia’s ruling on hold and leaving
open the possibility that nothing will change next week unless Garcia
forces the issue with further action.

Despite the uncertainty, Garcia’s ruling set off both a wave of
celebration from Key West to Tallahassee and vows from conservative
Christian groups to protect Florida’s definition of marriage as being
between one man and one woman. Meanwhile, Democrats hoped to capitalize
on the ruling, with the state party chairwoman declaring Thursday that
“love wins.”

Huntsman and Jones, who met at a gay pride
celebration and have been a couple for 11 years, told the Miami Herald
they were “ecstatic.” The couple sued the Monroe County Clerk in April
for a marriage license, and said the wait felt like forever.

Meanwhile, support flowed out from the state’s Democratic politicians.

Bondi’s
opponent in the November election, Perry Thurston, called on the
incumbent attorney general to “stop wasting taxpayer dollars on her
ideological crusade” against same-sex marriage. Democratic candidate for
governor Charlie Crist followed with his own statement: “Today was a
great step towards equality in Florida.”

Crist, who held office as
a Republican before becoming a Democrat in 2012, was governor when
Florida passed the constitutional amendment banning the recognition of
same-sex marriages. He has since called the ban “discriminatory.”

The dominoes continue to fall even as the Christofascists continue to force their sick, psychologically disturbed religious beliefs on all citizens. They are a threat to the religious liberties of others and need to become political and social pariahs.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/17/4240865/keys-judge-gay-couples-can-marry.html#storylink=cpMeanwhile, support flowed out from the state’s Democratic politicians.
Bondi’s
opponent in the November election, Perry Thurston, called on the
incumbent attorney general to “stop wasting taxpayer dollars on her
ideological crusade” against same-sex marriage. Democratic candidate for
governor Charlie Crist followed with his own statement: “Today was a
great step towards equality in Florida.”
Crist, who held office as
a Republican before becoming a Democrat in 2012, was governor when
Florida passed the constitutional amendment banning the recognition of
same-sex marriages. He has since called the ban “discriminatory.”

Since the post World War I division of the Middle East by the European powers, the region's artificial nations have been more or less in constant chaos on one level of another. The few periods of "stability" have largely stemmed from brutal dictators who for a time could keep the lid on ethnic and religious hatreds and rivalries. Indeed, one of the few nations in the region with a true historic identity is Iran which still dreams back to the days of glory of the Persian Empire. Despite the ranting delusions of war criminal Dick Cheney and his fellow neocons, no amount of American blood and money will fix the problems in Iraq. Thus, one perverse proposal: give Iraq to Iran and destabilize Iran. Think I am kidding? Here are excerpts from a piece in The Daily Beast that looks at the perverse logic:

Back in the George W. Bush administration’s darkest days occupying
Iraq, I ran into a guy who was about as close to Bush as you could get
without being Bush himself. We were at one of those Davos cocktail
parties where you can barely hear what you are saying yourself, much
less what’s being said to you. But I wanted to press this guy on all
that had gone wrong in Iraq, especially the fact that the mullahs
of Iran were gaining so much power and influence on the American dime.
“All that blood and treasure and we might as well have handed Baghdad to Tehran on a platter,” I shouted.

The
Bush clone looked at me—and I don’t know if this was just an
off-the-cuff kiss-off, or a half-considered bon mot, or some perverse
quasi-serious notion of his (not speaking for the president, of
course)—but what he said was, “If you really want to fuck Iran, let ‘em
have Iraq.”

[T]he idea stayed with me as one of those notions that is so logical,
yet so outside the box, that nobody ever will take it seriously. Well, now, maybe we should.

It's time the Iraqi Pottery Barn rule—“you break it, you pay a
trillion dollars for it"—applied to someone else. And Iran's a very good
candidate.

The people of the United States have done all that
they should do, giving their lives, their taxes and their sacred honor
to try to set straight the mess created on the basis of bad
intelligence, bad judgment and bald lies.

One of the supreme ironies in the tragedy playing out before us now
is that the Iranians were supposed to be so much smarter than we were in
dealing with the region. Ask 'em, they'll tell you. Neighboring nations
often hold each other in contempt, but the Persian view of
Arabs—"lizard eaters," as the saying goes—is beyond the
Aryan Iranian pale.

Again and again we were told by sundry Middle
East experts that the wise mullahs had every interest in maintaining a
stable Iraq. And maybe the wise ones did. But they were not the ones who
went into action.

The consequences of this devastation in the Fertile Crescent are almost incalculable for the people, for the land, and for the ancient history
that is rooted there. But, much as we might mourn the losses, why
should the United States be in the business of trying to hold it all
together now?

Let's see: There is a humanitarian argument, yes.
There is probably an oil argument, as always in the Middle East. But the
only argument that holds any real weight with the American people is
that terrorists will make the newly self-declared caliphate in the
ISIS-conquered lands a base of operations against the United States. You
remember the old Bush-era slogan that helped get us into Iraq in the
first place? "We've got to fight them over there (Iraq) so we don't have
to fight them here (meaning, say, Kansas)."

Think again. There's a risk to the U.S., yes. But very little of the
ISIS ethos has to do with hitting the Freedom Tower or the Capitol Dome.
It's all about slaughtering Shiites, like, you know, the Iranians.

Did I mention the nuclear negotiations with Iran? No. What's striking about them now is their irrelevance. All along, the atomic minuet with Tehran has been built on assumptions—ours and theirs—that are, as it turns out, erroneous.

It is no secret that I despise John Boehner who is not only a failed Speaker of the House of Representatives but also a moron in my view. Unable to control GOP saboteurs in the House GOP and constantly looking fearfully over his shoulder to the lunatics in the Christofascist/Tea Party base of the GOP, he is a loser who cares more about holding onto his position as Speaker than what is good for America. His latest stunt to appease the spittle flecked cretins of the GOP base is his lawsuit against Barack Obama. Thankfully, the lawsuit seems to be generating embarrassment and negatives that are Boehner's just reward. Salon looks at the potentially backfiring effort. Here are highlights:

It’s getting more and more difficult with each passing day to view
John Boehner’s long-shot lawsuit against Barack Obama as anything but a
ridiculous political stunt. Boehner’s own arguments for suing the
president are illogical
and it’s impossible to escape the fact that he’s trying to force
implementation of a law he wants repealed, but there was always a chance
that backers of the suit would try and put together a coherent case for
why it should be taken seriously. That apparently was too much to ask
as well.

Boehner’s suit began its slow march through the legal
system today as the House Rules Committee convened a hearing to
deliberate the matter and hear testimony from a panel of constitutional
lawyers. In practice, the panel testifying before the Rules Committee
was equally divided: two legal minds in support of the lawsuit, two
against. On paper, however, the split wasn’t quite so equal.

Jonathan Wiesman of the New York Times reported
earlier today that one of the witnesses testifying in support of the
House’s ability to sue the president, law professor Elizabeth Price
Foley, wrote an Op-Ed for the Daily Caller just few months ago arguing that Congress cannot
sue the president because it does not have standing. She was
unambiguous about it, and specifically cited Obama’s move to delay
enforcement of the employer mandate – the exact issue she’s now arguing
the House has standing to sue over:

When a president
delays or exempts people from a law — so-called benevolent suspensions —
who has standing to sue him? Generally, no one. Benevolent suspensions
of law don’t, by definition, create a sufficiently concrete injury for
standing. That’s why, when President Obama delayed various provisions of
Obamacare — the employer mandate, the annual out-of-pocket caps, the
prohibition on the sale of “substandard” policies — his actions cannot
be challenged in court.

So the pro-lawsuit side
weren’t just arguing against precedent and established legal principles,
they were arguing against themselves.

And they’re also apparently basing their argument on a legal fiction.

If these were the only embarrassments for the pro-lawsuit faction,
then their day would have been bad enough. But they’re also catching
rebukes from key Republicans. After Boehner said last week that
immigration reform was officially dead for the year, Rep. Mario
Diaz-Balart took a swipe at his own leadership by arguing that the best
way to curb the threat of Obama’s executive action on the matter was to
actually pass legislation – an implicit rejection of the rationale behind Boehner’s lawsuit.

And yesterday, during a speech at Hillsdale College, Rep. Paul Ryan offered his own thoughts on asking judges to intervene in political fights:

Finally,
there is the temptation to ask courts to intervene and solve our
problems for us. Some conservatives think of judges the way Progressives
think of bureaucrats: technical experts with the solutions to our
constitutional conflicts. But judges, like bureaucrats, are often the
problem. . . . .

None of this, of course, will stop Republicans from voting to approve
the suit. It’s clear that victory in court is not the endgame and never
was. It’s always been about riling up conservatives ahead of the
election by sticking it to Obama.

The super liner SS United States was built less than 10 miles from where I live and there are many in the area still living who worked on its construction. To this day it holds the speed record for Atlantic crossings by an ocean liner - its top speed still unknown, but having averaged 44 miles per hour on one crossing. Not bad for a ship 990 feet long. Built in 1952 (the year of my birth) the United States was among the last of the great liners that once were representatives of national pride and prestige. Now the ship lies tied up in Philadelphia- for years it languished in Norfolk where I had the opportunity to go on board - and her fate is uncertain although there is talk of moving her to New York City for conversion into a hotel/convention venue. A piece in the New York Times looks at the ship which should be preserved as a national symbol. Here are excerpts:

Once upon a time, it carried princes and potentates across the Atlantic in high style and at great speed.

Then
it was towed ignominiously to Ukraine where the partitions and
bulkheads that once divided luxurious cabins and glittering ballrooms
were torn out to remove acres of asbestos.

And
since 1996, the steamship United States has been tied to a Delaware
River pier beside a South Philadelphia shopping mall, while chunks of
paint peel off its black hull and red-and-white funnels.

Now,
the 990-foot-long ocean liner that plied the Atlantic from 1952 until
1969 is the focus of what its financially struggling owner, the SS
United States Conservancy, says is a final effort to save it from the
scrap yard.

Saying
the ship could be only months away from being broken up, the
conservancy is in talks with three developers about its potential to
become a hotel, museum, shopping and restaurant mall, entertainment
complex, conference center, educational facility, or some combination of
all options for reuse.

Conservancy
officials say the ship has about 500,000 square feet of usable space
that represents both a business opportunity and a means of rescuing the
historic vessel, 45 years after losing its trans-Atlantic market to
commercial aviation.

Scrapping
the ship would destroy a piece of American social history and an
engineering landmark that still holds the record for the fastest
trans-Atlantic crossing by an ocean liner, said Susan L. Gibbs,
executive director of the conservancy and granddaughter of the ship’s
designer, William Francis Gibbs. “There is no other American ocean liner left,” she said in an interview. “This is the last one.”

Redevelopment
is expected to cost $170 million to $300 million, depending on the
combination of uses, and “seed capital” of about $15 million will be
needed for an initial phase of the project, Mr. McSweeney said. Putting
the ship back into the cruise market could cost as much as $1 billion,
which is too expensive to contemplate, he added.

He
declined to identify the potential developers but said all would move
the ship to New York, its former home port, where its commercial
potential would be most likely to be realized.

Mr.
McSweeney said that the conservancy — which bought the ship from
Norwegian Cruise Line for $3 million in 2011 — also considered locating
the ship in Miami, Baltimore, Boston and Philadelphia and other cities
but that none matched New York.

The
ship’s future may have parallels with the Rotterdam, another liner that
sailed the Atlantic for Holland America Line from 1959 until 1997, and
is now a mixed-used center in its home port.

After
leaving service as a liner, the Rotterdam was bought by a Dutch
government-backed company for 250 million euros and converted into
spaces for businesses.

Since
2010, it has been occupied by shops and restaurants, a theater, a
meeting center and a hotel, which together attract about 500,000
visitors a year, according to Casper van Hooren, a former investor in
the project and now an adviser to the SS United States Conservancy.

Mr.
van Hooren said the Rotterdam’s businesses over all are profitable, and
he predicted that the liner United States would succeed as a result of
New York’s many tourists.

Inside the ship, cabins once occupied by notable figures such as the
Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Harry Truman and Rita Hayworth are now
marked by low dividers in the steel floor, while the ballroom where Duke
Ellington once played for first-class passengers in tuxedos and ball
gowns is a dimly lit shell overhung with disconnected pipes and wiring.

America routinely destroys its historic buildings and sites. I hope the United States is saved. If moved to New York City, we'd certainly visit it.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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